Where machines could replace humans

Written by Emanuela Lertora

Your smartphone and computer are likely to be using Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. These are personal AI assistants that interpret what you are saying and provide solutions. Other applications of AI that surround us are search engines, image recognition (e.g. Google Goggles), spam filters, online help bots, telephone bots, and online ad targeting.

At the high profile end of the spectrum there are also examples like Google’s Driverless Cars, and the recent Go competition between Korean Grandmaster Lee Sedol and Google’s AlphaGo (won by the bot).

Automated Journalism

AP (Associated Press) has been using automation to increase [...]

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January 4, 2018

Automation & Machine Learning for the Market Research Industry

Written by Emanuela Lertora

The benefits of automation is a short list, but it contains some very important items nonetheless. The most widely agreed element is ‘doing more, faster, with less’ (fewer people and/or less money).

Where is Automation Heading?

The crowd shared their short to medium-term aspirations for automation. Key opportunities were:

• Integrating a picture of the customer, with data coming from many sources, being stored in an accessible format, and interrogated with automated tools.

• Increasing the ability of skilled staff to conduct more research and spend more time on insight – they will spend less time on admin, repetition, and [...]

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March 12, 2017

10 tips to win online customers

Written by Emanuela Lertora

To date, the online marketplace has been dominated by relatively cheap and easy to deliver items such as books, music, electronics, accessories and apparels, but recent trends show consumers are willing to buy new product categories online. This pattern is encouraging, and it opens up a space for brands and product categories that haven’t entered yet the digital shopping channel.

The shift in the market has been triggered by the consumers’ preference of streaming books and music instead of buying them, and by the introduction of new shipping and delivering options in the market, that make it easy and more common to buy products [...]

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February 20, 2017

Energy Diversification – The way forward for the Gulf States

Written by Emanuela Lertora

The GCC’s interest in renewable energy has been on the rise in recent years. All countries in the region recognize the benefit of renewable energy as a cost-effective and reliable power source. Government organizations predict that, by 2020, 10% of power production will come from renewable sources, and they are rapidly moving forward to meet this objective.

With the region’s power consumption expected to continue growing at a rapid pace over the next two decades, renewables have become an important element to diversify domestic energy sources.

In 2016, IRENA (The International Renewable Energy Agency based in Abu Dhabi) released the [...]

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December 26, 2016

UAE Forecast for the Next Three Years – The Business Leaders’ Point of View

Written by Emanuela Lertora

Over the last three months, KPMG has surveyed some of the UAE’s key decision makers, CEOs and leaders from top organizations and emerging businesses, across economic sectors, to better understand their views and strategies regarding current and future market opportunities and challenges. All CEOs involved in the study were confident that their organizations would grow over the next three years, with 60% of the CEOs confident that organic growth—such as expanding their customer base or entering into new business lines or geographies—would most effectively drive stakeholder value over the next three years.

KEY GROWTH GENERATORS FOR THE [...]

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December 7, 2016

Why you should care about Big Data

Big Data is a trendy word used quite often in business conversations across industries.But what does Big Data mean exactly? And, more importantly, why we should care about it?

In today’s life, everything that we do, from shopping to travelling, from banking to healthcare and listening to music, leaves a digital trace of data behind. The type of data that we create with our daily activities is often unstructured like photos, videos, posts on social media and voice recording, those types of data can’t fit in our ordinary spreadsheet or database, but hey need more advance and structure analytical tools. Big Data is the [...]

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November 17, 2016

The Rise of Medical Tourism in the Middle East

Written by Emanuela Lertora

The rise of healthcare costs in western countries and the lack of insurance coverage for certain procedures are currently boosting the global medical tourism sector. People are finding themselves willing to travel to other countries to seek medical, dental, and surgical care they can’t find or afford at home.

While Asian countries like Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia have been popular medical tourism destinations for decades, a number of Middle Eastern nations are now becoming the go-to spots for quality, affordable healthcare. Medical tourism is said to [...]

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October 13, 2016

Muslim Travel Market Insights

Written by Emanuela Lertora

The Muslim travel market continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the global travel industry.

The Global Muslim Travel Index, which is the most comprehensive research on the halal travel and hospitality sector produced by MasterCard-CrescentRating, estimated that in 2015 there were 117 million international Muslim travelers—which is 10% of the overall industry. This figure is expected to reach 168 million by 2020 (rising to 11% of the global total), with revenue generated by the Muslim travel segment to top USD 200 billion.